Well, despite leaving the game (and feeling quite content about the whole thing), I’ve come back to FFXIV.

Why? Well… for one thing, I love expansions, and the Heavensward caught my eye, so I wanted to prepare for it. But the main reason I came back was to visit a friend who told me she was getting married in-game. She knows who she is (and she’ll probably read this post, too ^^;). I’m not a big screenshot person so I don’t really have any to share of the wedding, unfortunately. It was really nice playing with friends again though, and I hope to continue to do so in Heavensward. I’m not quite sure if I intend to be quite as serious about raiding as I was before though.

I know I’ve never really talked about it much here, but I still enjoy being a fairly casual MMO player from time to time. There was a huge gap between when I stopped playing WoW to XIV – one where I really felt like I wanted to play an MMO, but couldn’t find the right one – or just didn’t capture the experience I enjoyed with other MMOs. It’s a weird thing, no? I really don’t think any MMO can recapture the early days of the genre, but I think a lot of “veterans” like myself are yearning for them. I can understand why XIV is how it is – especially from a business standpoint, but it’ll always lack that mystery, depth, difficulty and sense of reward that other MMOs like EQ and FFXI had (among other qualities that I left out). Nowadays though, the kind of game that XIV is suits me fine… for now.

Since it’s the end of the year, I might as well name the game I loved the most this year – it’s obviously Sen no Kiseki II.

As for next month/year, I’ll likely be playing the long awaited Tales of Zestiria~

(This post will be the start of many catch up posts. This is probably the most I’ve fallen behind on updating, but I’ll do my best to chronicle my gaming again, month by month.)

For me, November was mainly spent playing Dragon Age: Inquisition, with a little bit of MH4G sprinkled in here and there.

Inquisition can pretty much be summed up with one word: Knight-Enchanter. Once I was able to specialize in it, Nightmare difficulty was pretty much a breeze. Soloing dragons with it is fun, but a different kind of fun than what I had before I specced Knight-Enchanter, which was essentially wrangling the fairly dumb AI under my control to meticulously win each battle. You might say I ruined my experience with the game a little bit by keeping my Inquisitor in that spec, but honestly I didn’t see it as a problem. Sadly, DA:I suffers from a ton of bloat quests – bloat which I didn’t know was bloat at the time so I completed them anyways – so having my KE around to just stomp everything with ease made it much more tolerable. Despite that, I did quite enjoy everything else about it. The story was decent enough, and I liked the majority of the characters and the dialogue. I also liked playing around with the talent trees, and the ability to respec cheaply and infinitely was great. Things weren’t looking so great for the Dragon Age series after 2, but Inquisition was enjoyable enough for me that I wouldn’t mind playing another entry.

Next month is… nothing? I’ll probably just spend my time playing random games in my backlog while waiting for the new Hearthstone expansion. See you next time~

Every time I play a new Kiseki game, I always end up feeling bad for everyone else still stuck with the first Trails in the Sky. Not only are they eagerly awaiting the continuation from FC, but they’re also just struggling with a drought of good JRPGs these days. Some day they’ll get to enjoy the insane roller coaster that is Ao no Kiseki just like I did, but I guess for now, you’ll have to put up with me gushing about Sen no Kiseki II.

Actually, I can’t say much about it out of a desire to not spoil anything! What I can say is that I tend to hype up games sometimes, to the point of it negatively affecting how I enjoy them when they finally do come out. Kiseki is really one of the only series I can hype up and never, ever be wrong about, and Sen no Kiseki II is no exception to this. My love for the series and all of the new characters has grown even more, and I cannot wait to see where Falcom takes us next. I’m really glad I took the time to play it as non-stop as I could, because it was totally worth avoiding the inevitable spoilers I’d accidentally find somewhere.

Final note: McBurn is a total badass and he needs to be in every future Kiseki game.

The rest of the month was spent playing random games I’ve missed out on due to FFXIV (I have a serious backlog going on =/) and some Monster Hunter 4G. Monster Hunter is Monster Hunter, I won’t even bother explaining anything there. The new monsters are fun, but they’ve added a lot more grindy things that I’m not too pleased about.

Next month should be Dragon Age Inquisition and maybe a few other things? I’ve been really bad about remembering release dates lately.